


With Love

by MrMich



Series: The Last Goodbye [2]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, spoilers for Episode 28
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-11 22:29:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19935556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrMich/pseuds/MrMich
Summary: Duck and Aubrey read the letters.Duck – who has always taken point, for all that he maintains he doesn’t want to be involved – brave, wonderful Duck, picks up his letter, studying the envelope like there’s some code that Ned left behind. A harsh bark of laughter catches in Aubrey’s throat. It comes out in a cut off sob. There’s no code. No hidden messages.He’s dead. He can’t come back, Aubrey reminds herself tiredly.





	With Love

Duck pushes open the door to the Cryptonomica. The bell above the door jangles merrily, jarring in the otherwise quiet room. He walks in. 

Aubrey somberly follows him through the door, sticking close to Duck. Seeking comfort. She hadn’t really thought too far past just getting inside. Now though, as she looks around the Cryptonomica, she’s just reminded of the small things. She swallows thickly and blinks, her eyes stinging. 

It had been a good idea to come with Duck. It would be too quiet without the shuffle of Duck’s feet, the creaks the floors make under his weight. It’s still uncomfortably silent in the face of what’s a usually bustling storefront, Ned’s voice bouncing off the walls as he expounds on the mystery of some new creature or another to the Cryptonomica’s guests. 

Aubrey drags her fingers over the base pedestal for some fish-rabbit… thing. It kicks up a puff of dust that flies straight into her face. She screws up her face, trying to resist the tickle in the back of her throat. She ultimately fails, and sneezes. It has the unfortunate effect of sending dust swirling everywhere. 

Duck gently nudges her shoulder. “Typical Ned, eh? Always said that keepin’ clean is for chumps who are too scared of the natural order.”

Aubrey smiles at him, a little wobbly at the edges. “That’s Ned, all right. Finding philosophies that let him get away with doing the bare minimum.” She ignores the fact that hardly anyone has been here to do any dusting over the past week. Not even Kirby managed to spend much time here, for all that the place belonged to him now. 

Duck starts towards the counter. Aubrey looks past him and sees the envelopes laid out there. Her gaze slips over to the envelope on the right, the swoop of the ‘A’ that starts her name.

Her breath catches in the back of her throat and she forces it past the lump stuck there. Duck moves towards the counter. Aubrey hangs back, taking only a single stuttered step forward. She can’t bring herself to really look at the letters just yet. 

But Duck – who has always taken point, for all that he maintains he doesn’t want to be involved – brave, wonderful Duck, picks up his letter, studying the envelope like there’s some code that Ned left behind. A harsh bark of laughter catches in Aubrey’s throat. It comes out in a cut off sob. There’s no code. No hidden messages. 

He’s dead. He can’t come back, Aubrey reminds herself tiredly. 

She moves towards her own letter. Picks it up. And then she just holds it, her fingers frozen in place over the indent of her name. 

Duck shifts in the corner of her eye, and Audrey’s gaze is dragged away from the letter. He nods to her, sliding a nail under the edge of the seal. She copies him, and they break the seal. 

The uneven rip of the envelope tearing is loud in her ears. 

Her eyes get stuck on the familiar slant of her name. Her eyes trace over the indents, where the ‘A’ is pressed in a little harder than the rest of the letters. The tail of the ‘y’ cuts off sharply. Each letter has clean arc, like Ned wrote every letter of her name with meticulous care. 

As Aubrey traces over the letters with the tip of her finger, she’s not even sure if she wants to continue reading. If she even _can_ continue. 

It takes another three tries before she’s able to read the rest of it. It’s slow going. She stops each time her eyes sting and starts over from the beginning, the words getting just slightly easier to take in with the repetition. 

And then she gets to the end of the letter. 

Her fingers start to tremble. They tighten numbly on the corners where she’s holding the paper, and the paper creases under the pressure.

Because she-

She’s the reason he’s gone. If she hadn’t told him to leave, then he might still be here. He’d have the backup, he’d be in Sylvain with her, or with Duck, or even standing by Mama and Barclay’s side. 

He wouldn’t have been alone. 

But he still might have died. And, Aubrey tells herself, seeking some comfort, that’s just who Ned was. He was brave and he cared so deeply, he’d have risked himself no matter who he was with. 

It doesn’t make her feel any better. 

Sick relief and deep guilt in war against each other in the pit of her stomach and the back of her throat. Her fingers twist again in the paper. Her eyes flit over the entire letter again, pulling in certain sentences, skipping over others. But the reason for her impossible emotions is stamped right there at the top of the letter, in Ned’s slanted handwriting. 

He wrote these letters as a last goodbye. An explanation before he skipped town on her advice. If he hadn’t decided to listen to her, if he didn’t think he was going to skip town…

Well, Aubrey wouldn’t be standing here, would she. She wouldn’t have a letter to hold, a sincere goodbye, Ned’s final words to her––because in the end, Ned was nothing but painfully sincere, and god, Aubrey misses him so much. 

He had a bigger heart than she did, and it was her mistake that she forgot that until after he was already gone. 

Aubrey reads the letter again. She closes her eyes at the last two lines, as equally a goodbye as a promise.

> ‘With love,
> 
> Edmund Kelly Chicane’

She swallows thickly and clenches her teeth, biting back the tears that sting her eyes. 

Duck clears his throat then, and the sound strikes out in the silence. Aubrey jumps a little, and her shoulders hunch up around her ears. Her fingers go slack and she loses her grip on the letter. She watches numbly as it flutters to the hardwood floors. 

She and Duck just stand there for a stretched moment, looking at the fallen letter. Its outline is blurred. As she looks down, the tears at the corners of her eyes threaten to spill over. 

Finally, Duck bends down, grabbing a corner of the letter and picking it up. He gently presses it back into Aubrey’s hands, and she grips the edges tightly, wrinkling them even more than they already had been. 

Duck turns back to his letter once Aubrey has firmly curled her fingers around her own. She glances over at him. 

He looks worn down in a way that she hasn’t really seen on him before and she finds herself wondering what it is that Ned’s written to him. Wonders if it’s anything like hers. Thinks about Duck tracing the signature at the bottom of the letter, signed with his love and trust and the name he hadn’t told any of them.

Aubrey and Duck spend another moment in the unbearable quiet of the Cryptonomica, looking down at their respective letters. Aubrey starts folding her letter back up, smoothing the wrinkled edges, and gently pushes it back into the envelope. 

She turns to Duck, whose letter is already stuffed back into its own envelope. His eyes are so tired. Aubrey wouldn’t be surprised to learn he’s had trouble sleeping. 

She nods to him and he nods back and the two leave the Cryptonomica. 

Aubrey looks back, just once. 

Beside her, Duck keeps his eyes locked forward. 

It’s hours later, when Aubrey is sinking into her favorite chair at Amnesty Lodge and Duck is sitting across from her that she asks, thinking about who Ned was to her. Who Ned was to Duck, too. 

“Hey, Duck? How-” her question wobbles around the lump in her throat. She tries again. “How did he sign his name on your letter? Ned, I mean,” she says lamely. She knows Duck didn’t need the clarification. 

“Aww, you know, one of his made up middle names again.” Duck’s voice is thick, like he’s talking around molasses. “It was Vamoose, this time. Gotta add that one to the list, I guess.” He takes a breath, clears his throat with a cough. “Why? How’d he sign yours?”

Aubrey looks up, willing away the tears that gather in the corners of her eyes, thinking furiously about what it meant to Ned that the love from Edmund Kelly Chicane is hers alone. 

She tries to smile at Duck. “Oh, uh, the same. Yeah, typical Ned, am I right?” She gives up on trying to blink back the tears and wipes them away with the corner of her sleeve. Aubrey coughs out a laugh, trying to sound fond. “A mystery to the very end.”

Looking at Duck’s face, she thinks that maybe her laugh came out harsher than she meant it to. Her thumb makes a soothing circle on the crinkled edge of the envelope she hadn’t let go of since picking it up from the counter of the Cryptonomica hours ago. 

She looks down at her chipped nail polish. She feels just as world weary as the day that fire took her mom from her. 

“He uh, he wrote my letter ‘with great admiration,’” Duck says. 

Aubrey looks up at him. She sees his slumped shoulders, the bags under his eyes. She forgets sometimes that he was Ned’s oldest friend. It shows now, in his grief, in the way he talks. The way he’s had trouble meeting her eyes, these past several days. The weight he’s always carried on his shoulders seems heavier now. Aubrey wonders if maybe Ned had helped him bear it for all those years. 

And yet here Duck is, offering _her_ words of comfort. 

She meets his eyes. The tears sting as they finally make their way down her cheeks. 

“He wrote mine with love." 

Her breath stutters in her throat, coming out in hiccups as she starts to sob, the tears burning tracks into her skin. She sees Duck move forward in her blurred vision and feels warm arms wrap her up into a hug. Aubrey reaches back, sliding her arms around his back and squeezing, trying to comfort him as much as he is her. She can feel the fabric of her shirt getting wet where Duck’s face is pressed into her shoulder. She clutches at him harder, her fingers digging into his shirt. 

She thinks of Ned, and the Edmund Kelly Chicane signed at the bottom of her letter, and makes an angry promise to herself to never let anything like this happen again. The tears drip off her chin and onto the floor between her’s and Duck’s feet.

The two stay like that for a long while, holding each other as they mourn Ned Chicane, the bravest man they knew. 

**Author's Note:**

> I've finally written it! I only regret that it took so long. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
